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Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Podcast enters its second year

My Week in Politics Podcast is now one year old having orginally begun just before Christmas 2005 as an experiment on the this is regional websites which I was helping to manage at the time.

Regular readers of this blog may already have seen my look back at the political year 2006 and look ahead to 2007 in text form, but both are now available as podcasts. The Review of 2006 is available HERE, and the Preview of 2007 HERE.

Meanwhile, I am pleased to report some recognition for the podcast from Jonathan Shepherd over at Tory Radio, another blogger who helped pioneer the podcast medium. He has awarded me a CBE for "services to political podcasting" in his unofficial New Year's Honours List.

It's the only New Year's Honours List on which I am likely to feature, or indeed have any desire to, so cheers Jonathan!

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"He saw politics very much like Trollope, as the interplay of personalities seeking preferment, rather than, like me, as a conflict of principles and programmes about social and economic change."

Denis Healey, writing about Roy Jenkins in "The Time of My Life."

"I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a series of far-fetched resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code. And you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I'll tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's homes and with people's services."

Neil Kinnock, Bournemouth 1985

"But the most eloquent message concerns the Blair government. It must be right at all times. Above all, the integrity of the leader can never be challenged. He never did hype up intelligence. He didn't take Britain to war on any other than the stated terms. Any suggestion of half-truth, or disguised intention, or concealed Bushite promises is the most disgraceful imaginable charge that deserves a state response that knows no limit.

"That's how a sideshow came to take over national life. Now it seems to have taken a wretched, guiltless man's life with it. Such is the dynamic that can be unleashed by a leader who believes his own reputation to be the core value his country must defend."

Hugo Young, on the death of Dr David Kelly, 2003

"The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life."